This disclosure relates, in general, to techniques for approval of services procurement information and, more particularly, to approval workflow and frameworks for approval of transactions related to service providers.
Many organizations can spend a large share of their total budgets on services. Yet, few organizations have the same visibility into service costs as they do for goods and materials. For even the most efficient enterprises, service spending can be a black hole of unsourced buying, lost savings opportunities, and limited oversight from a purchasing department. Many traditional purchasing systems can be too inflexible to accommodate the wide variety of ways in which services are priced and contracted.
Standalone systems also typically lack workflow integration to critical business functions. As organizations continue to move to paperless systems, the complexity of managing service costs electronically within an organization can increase accordingly. In many instances, existing services procurement management and workflows are not sufficient to provide the functionality needed to process the wide variety of ways in which services are priced and contracted. For example, a service provider might submit information that requires approval from at least one manager, supervisor, or other appropriate person, department, etc. When there is only one service provider or all service providers contract with one person, this process can be relatively straightforward as the service providers can simply submit information to that person for approval. Problems arise, however, when there are multiple service providers providing multiple services to multiple persons and/or entities that then become responsible for approval.
Further, some services may require multiple layers of approval. An individual or entity making an initial approval might in turn report to more than one supervisor or supervising entity. Not only is this routing complexity not addressed in current systems, but current systems also do not provide a way to maintain service provider information throughout the various routing processes, as well as outside this processing, in order to make multiple routing and/or status determinations based thereon.
Accordingly, what is desired is to solve problems relating to managing service costs, some of which may be discussed herein. Additionally, what is desired is to reduce drawbacks related to managing service costs, some of which may be discussed herein.